1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a rotary input device and electronic equipment equipped with the rotary input device.
2. Description of Related Art
A rotary operation device adopted by electronic equipment, such as a portable terminal machine, audio visual (AV) equipment, and a personal computer, has hitherto been known. The rotary operation device performs an input operation into the electronic equipment by a rotary operation of a rotary operation device of the rotary input device. Such a rotary input device is configured so that selection items displayed on the display screen of the electronic equipment may be sequentially switched to be selected in conjunction with the rotation of the rotary operation device. After an operator has manually rotated the rotary operation device until an objective selection item is selected, the operator performs an operation for fixing the selection thereof, and thereby an instruction corresponding to the selected selection item is input.
Because each selection item on the screen is switched to be selected only by performing a simple rotary operation of the rotary operation device in such a rotary input device, the rotary input device has the problem of the difficulty of grasping the selection of a selection item on the screen by a sense of a hand or a finger of an operator.
Accordingly, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-345499 discloses a mechanism giving a user a lever operating feeling by generating an operation reaction force so as to put back an operation to a neutral position in the direction reverse to an operation direction according to a rotary operation speed of a rotation mechanism section.
Because the operation of an operation section to return to the neutral position by the rotation mechanism section and an image under display are not in conjunction with each other in the technique disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-345499, for example, if the operation section has returned to the neutral position in the state in which the image under display reaches an end of a range, the image under display stays as it is, and the technique has the problem of bad usability.